Searches for physics beyond the standard model at HERA

This article summarizes the results of searches for new physics beyond the standard model at HERA performed by the ZEUS and H1 experiments. Recent results are presented on direct searches for electron-quark resonant states such as leptoquarks or squarks in R-parity violating SUSY, on indirect searches for new physics leading to eeqq contact interactions and on searches for single top-quark production through anomalous flavour-changing coupling in neutral-current processes. Most of the results shown are based on the full statistics collected before the luminosity upgrade of HERA and some of them were also updated with newer results made available after the workshop. (author)